Barricade' - New TGEA feature demo?

#1 Good catch. Hopefully soon.

#2 This is still WIP, but I'm sure some of you will recognize it from back in 2006. This was our first TGEA Feature demo and MattF is nearly finished porting it to TGEA 1.7. We'll likely release it in the near future to TGEA owners.

#3 Hehe - thanks Brett. I don't remember ever seeing it back in 2006. I just saw the link at the end of the Penny Arcade video and thought it looked great.

#4 Wow, love that translucent gui over gui. :-)
I remember a world something like this....possibly was released with 1.0.3
It looks awesome tho, and shows off some of what tgea is capable of. (in the right hands)

#5 The water shoreline "alpha blending" is new to TGEA 1.7? I never noticed it before/could not get it working.

#6 @Mark - I don't think thats really doing shoreline blending... seems that the water surface is just set fairly transparent. If it was doing it right you wouldn't see any z flicker.

To do proper shoreline blends you need to render the scene z depth to texture and sample that when your rendering the water surface.

#7 So the "particles-with-material use" is new ? correct ? .. I have not seen that work in pre-1.7.
Video states "heat refraction".

anyone ? anyone ? Beuller ? Beuller ?

#8 The video states Refraction, which has been in TGEA for quite some time. "Particles-with-materials"... I dont see anything. The only Particles I see is the fire on that building... and there's no Heat Refraction. What you mention would be nice though... :)

#9 Precisely James...please try and read the small print here:

#10 Yeah. I noticed it in the GUI, too. Most likely a work-in-progress. Can't wait to see the final of it. Hopefully they get everything they want in it!

#11 How do you map materials to particles? Is it in the 1.7 docs?

#12 If the particle(s) use a texture to render wouldn't it be just like mapping a Material to any other texture?

#13 I'm afraid this was something left over from the original tech demo that never properly made its way into the engine.

I did switch the Particles over to using a Material instead of a texture but the issue is that the optimized particle vertex format doesn't actually pass much useful information into the Materials.

This is something I would be interested in looking into at some future point (heat refracting particles are *very* cool!) but it isn't currently on the books (bigger fish to fry for the next several months).

You *can* use localized Precipitation with custom shaders applied to them which would get you a long ways towards this kind of effect.

#14 Thanks for the information about this Matt, I/we know you're busy.

(If anyone has decals and particles linked into materials(done in a decent manner in v1.7.1+) please contact me and we can negotiate.) [thanks]

#15 Thanx Matt - Things over the past 6 (or so months) really changed for the better and it greatly appreciated!

#16 The progress is great for sure. I just wish the demos used better terrain painting to show proper transition of the world elements, i.e.: better ground texture around and under water; terrain wear around high traffic areas, etc. It just seemed throughout the demo you are plopping a bunch of features into a sandbox rather than blending them together to show current and future customers how you can blend all of these components together to make an immersive environment.

The forge demo came close to hitting the proverbial nail on the head. Now we just need an outdoor demo to do the same...

#17 I definitely hear ya on that Brian =)

We are just getting started with our outdoor demos and hope to keep polishing them. Feel free to grab the Barricade demo yourself and play around with the art. If you come up with anything cool we would be interested in rolling it in.